Namath Author:Mark Kriegel It was pure Namath -- outrageous, almost arrogantly confident, blasphemous to old sports hands, a great big nose-thumbing to the establishment. When Joe Namath vowed that the New York Jets, representing the perennially hapless AFL, would beat the NFL's great Baltimore Colts, he was dismissed as a kid quarterback with too much money and not enoug... more »h humility. After all, the Jets were 18-point underdogs in 1969's upcoming "Third World Championship Game" -- a Super Bowl that until then had been anything but super. But in making good on his guarantee, Namath did more than deliver one of the most stunning upsets of all time. He changed the face of sports forever. Namath was the first of his kind, an athlete whose place in the culture owed as much to television and the sexual revolution as it did to the point spread. It was Namath who enabled the audience to see sports as show biz. It was Namath who endowed what had been a crude, violent game with his own inimitable production values. For an entire generation he became a spectacular voluptuary of booze and broads, a guy who made bachelorhood seem an almost sacred calling.« less